Chapter 27
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The moment Cobb said the words, Miguel was on his feet. Angus followed. Neither of them spoke. The door closed behind them with the quiet certainty of something that had been decided.
They stood in the corridor, the sounds of the building settling around them—phones ringing at the front desk, the coffee machine, the ordinary texture of a working morning that knew nothing about what had just happened in that room.
Miguel turned to face him.
“The tox results,” he said. “You mentioned them in that room before the official report was filed.” He watched Angus’s face. “How did you know?”
Angus looked at the wall at the end of the corridor. “It’s not important.”
Miguel went very still.
“It’s not important?” he echoed. “Are you kidding me?” Each word was deliberate and separate, carrying the force of a man who had been patient for a long time and had just reached the end of that patience.
“How can it not be important? I’m running this investigation, Angus.
I’m the one responsible for what happens in that room, and you just disclosed information you had no business having—and you’re standing here telling me not to worry about it?
Not to mention that your involvement is highly questionable.
Are you trying to get locked up for this or what? ”
His voice had risen enough for the office to notice. Jeanine at the front desk was very still. A deputy had found a reason to be near the corridor entrance without actually being in it. The alertness of people who had learned to read the mood of this building and were reading it now.
Miguel saw it too. He looked down the corridor at the watching faces and tightened his jaw.
“Not here,” he said. He met Angus’s gaze and held it. The anger was real, but it rested on something older and more complicated than anger alone. “Let’s go to your office. Because you owe me the truth, Angus. You at least owe me that.”
He turned and walked, and Angus followed him across the office floor.
The office watched them go. Not obviously.
Nobody stopped what they were doing. Nobody stared.
But the atmosphere in the room had changed.
Something significant had moved through it.
By the time Miguel pushed open the door to Angus’s office and Angus followed him inside, the working morning beyond the glass panes had taken on the careful stillness of people pretending not to watch.
Miguel didn’t sit down. He stood on the far side of the desk with his notebook in hand and looked at Angus with the deliberateness of a man who had learned that the first words in a hard conversation are the ones that shape everything that follows.
“How did you know?” he asked again. Quieter now, the corridor heat gone from it, but not softer. More exact.
Angus looked at him. At the man he had looked at across desks and crime scenes and early mornings for nearly a decade.
The man who had never once given him anything other than straightforward dealing.
And Angus understood, looking at him now, that there was no version of this conversation that would end well.
Only versions that ended more or less honestly.
“Murphy told me,” he said, his hands gripping the top of his office chair behind which he stood. “She came over the other night. Off the record, off everything, because she trusted me and she wanted me to know.” He paused. “And I used it in that room. Against Cobb.”
The silence that followed was heavy. Miguel set his notebook on the desk without looking at it and stood with his hands resting on the cover.
He looked at Angus and the space between them, which now contained something that hadn’t been there when the morning started—a gap neither of them had known was building until it was suddenly visible.
“She came to you,” Miguel said, his voice measured and careful in the way it got when he was carrying something he didn’t want to spill, “in the middle of all of this, when half the town was putting distance between itself and you and the other half was choosing its words with care. She drove to your house, sat down with you, and handed you something that could have cost her professionally—because she believed in you. Because she chose to believe in you when she could have stood back and let the process run its course.”
He stopped. Drew a breath.
“And you used it. Without telling her. Without telling me. You put it in that room and let me watch you use it without knowing what it was, where it came from, or what the risk was to the person who trusted you with it. You involved me in your betrayal, Angus.”
Angus didn’t answer. There wasn’t an answer to give that wasn’t just a more articulate version of yes.
Outside, through the glass panes, the office had stopped pretending not to watch.
“I need you to let it go,” Angus said.
Miguel looked at him.
“I know what I’m asking,” Angus said. “I know the consequences. I know exactly what it says about me that I’m asking it.
But if you follow that thread, it leads to her, Miguel, and she doesn’t deserve to have her name in a hearing or a report because she made the mistake of trusting me.
” Something in his chest tightened. It had nothing to do with the case and everything to do with the man standing across from him. “I’m asking you to let it go.”
The silence lasted long enough to mean something. Miguel picked up his pen from the notebook cover and rolled it between his fingers, a small unconscious habit Angus had seen more times than he could count. It was what Miguel did when he was still working through something.
“For all the years we’ve done this together,” Miguel said, “across everything we’ve handled, every case, every day when something went wrong and we had to decide how to handle it. In all of that, I have never once seen you do a dishonest thing.”
He stopped, and the pen stilled.
“This is the first.”
His tone didn’t carry accusation. It landed like a ledger entry made by a man who kept honest accounts and could not, in good conscience, omit what belonged in the record, even when honesty came with a price. Especially then.
Angus stood in his office without his badge and felt those four words settle into his chest like something placed there carefully, something that would take a long time to dislodge.
Miguel picked up his phone.
“I’m going to call Cobb’s attorney,” he said, dialing without looking up. “That’s the next step. Whatever else needs to be said between us gets said after.”
He put the phone to his ear and waited for the connection. Then, still not looking at Angus, he said, “We don’t speak of this again.”